Grab is present in seven markets across Southeast Asia, but the first merchants it is onboarding are street food sellers in Singapore, where the firm is headquartered. An initial 25 are on the platform now, but the plan is to grow that number to 1,000 in Singapore by the end of the year.

This won’t change the game overnight for the company’s 60 million-plus users, but it is a sign of where Grab is headed since it announced plans to develop a payments platform last year. It takes GrabPay from being merely the system that enables you pay for a taxi using your credit (or pre-bought Grab credit) to one that could be used more widely as a digital payments app.

The process is much like popular payment services like Alipay: users just scan the merchant’s QR code, key in the amount and hit pay. Grab is placing incentives on using GrabPay credits — which will make the service more like wallet — but it also works with credit cards and other payment methods Grab offers locally.

The company is being rather coy on when it will expand the payments feature to new markets, other than that it will happen next year. Nonetheless it will be interesting to observe the impact it has in Singapore, the country of seven million people which exhibits more Western consumer habits than any place in Southeast Asia.

“This is an important part of the journey,” Grab co-founder Hooi Ling Tan told TechCrunch in an interview. “We’ve been talking and executing on our plan but today is a significant milestone for making GrabPay truly a cash replacement.”

“If I leave my wallet at home, I can still pay for breakfast, lunch and dinner. In time I’ll be able to buy goods like hardware or groceries using GrabPay,” Tan added.

There’s a veritable tonne of fintech startups and solutions aimed at digitizing payments already and Singapore, the hub for venture capital and a global financial market, has tended to be a first stop for most. But Tan is adamant that GrabPay has a super power lacking in others: users.

“For merchants in Singapore, the moment they sign up they get access to four million customers,” she said. “Telcos and banks haven’t been able to move to mobile wallets is because it requires them to adopt new customer behavior. [But] we’ve already shifted a significant portion of customer behavior.”

“For us to provide better services to a larger portion of Southeast Asia, existing partners we could work with didn’t meet the scale or expectation of what we had,” Tan said of the payment push. “Nine in ten in Southeast Asia don’t have a credit card and 75 percent are unbanked — it’s clearly a big problem and, in our minds, larger than transportation.”

It isn’t the first to go down this route by any means, however. Go-Jek, its billion-dollar rival based in Indonesia, introduced its Go-Pay service in 2016 while India’s Ola, which shares common investors with Grab, has operated standalone service Ola Money since 2015.

Note: Article updated to correct that Grab aims to onboard 1,000 merchants this year not 20,000.